Happy New Year to all! I recently shot a very short (22 seconds), rough video of myself assembling a sculpture and thought I'd post it here, despite it not being edited. I want to do more of this in the future, the process of putting my sculptures together is an important part of my work — it really shows the fundamental qualities of form, gravity and balance that I'm so interested in.
December 23, 2011
October 28, 2011
Since the beginning of October I've been in residence at Château de la Napoule, an arts foundation about five miles west of Cannes, France. This is the third residency I've done (my first here) and it's been a tremendously productive, useful time. I thought I'd share a few details and pictures from the first weeks here, including some of what I've been working on. There are eight artists here — writers, visual artists, a composer, filmmaker and dancer. We each have our own living and working spaces, but we meet for long dinners (and plenty of wine) each night.
Below: my studio; my 'morning drawing table;' the residents at dinner.
And two more, me at work:
I'm dedicating most of my time to making preliminary sketches for new sculptures. The focus and time that this residency offers is hard to come by, which is why I use it for this most creatively-demanding phase of my work. A few of the early sketches:
I'm also doing something new this month, experimenting with fabricating metal maquettes — quick translations of my drawings using the crudest of materials (bent rebar held together with wire). This has been surprisingly useful as a way for me to play with relationships and expand my understanding of the interactions of form and gravity, without requiring all the time and expense of making a sculpture with my usual materials. A couple of images of these are below...
I've taken several fantastic road trips this summer, and photographed the landscapes extensively (see July's post about my interest in landscape forms in my sculptures). Here are a few (heavily-cropped) images that I think are promising, but haven't begun working on either sketches nor the sculptures from them yet.
August 25, 2011:
I was recently asked to make a sculpture for a wedding on the coast of Florida. I wanted the piece to have a relationship and relevance to the ceremony, but without explicit symbolism that would get in the way of the form itself.
I settled on the general form for the sculpture quickly after considering the idea of the wedding. I wanted it to be an enclosing form, with two parts reaching both upward and out, and also in and towards each other. I wanted the components to be independent but connected, and I wanted to use the property of balance to emphasize the inter-reliance of its parts.
Shortly after the wedding, I made a smaller, indoor version of the same form (this was the first time I've ever started with a large sculpture and reduced it; I've done the opposite many times). It's 25" x 28" x 2".
Iterations of Sketches:
While I settled on the general form for this sculpture somewhat quickly, my process is always long on drawing before I ever touch wood or metal. In this case I drew and redrew iterations on the basic idea perhaps 40 times over several weeks, until it felt completely clear and "right" to me.
With any sculpture I make there's a moment when a sketch just works, when nothing should be added nor taken away, when both aesthetic and structural relationships are clear. This is when a sculpture is born for me — more even than when I complete the final sculpture. It's also at this same point that I know the sculpture will balance as I've drawn it.
If I don't reach this moment with a particular sketched form, it can also be terribly frustrating. I have a deep stack of sketches from the last 15 years that I've never reached this point with. Some I've given up on, though many I still pull out once in a while and make a renewed effort on. Sometimes I'll also return to a form that I had completed long ago, and whatever has changed in me since then will lead me to make new iterations and sometimes a new sculpture. Going through these old iterations gives me insight into how I've changed as a sculptor over time.
Here are a few of the early sketches for this sculpture, and then the sketch where I knew it "worked."
I'm working towards formalizing this 'updates' page, and am sending it out as a newsletter to clients, galleries, collaborators, etc. This entry, for July 2011, is the first of these. If you'd like to get these by email, get in touch with me.
One Sculpture: "Four Pieces Out and Up"
Wenge
14" x 69" x 2"
From sketch to sculpture:
This form originated from a photograph that I took from the car, while driving north from Santa Fe. I worked on the sketch extensively while in residency at Fundaçion Valparaiso in Spain this February and March and finished the sculpture in May. It's a long form at almost six feet, and works well mounted to a small shelf, on a mantle piece, or on a long table.
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Deeper Look: Landscape Forms in My Sculptures
The forms I see within landscapes have always appealed to me as a subject matter, but for a long time they seemed outside of my sculptural lexicon: too macro in scale, too reliant on their contexts. Perhaps more than anything, though, I had difficulty translating the inherent massiveness of the land into my work.
Recently I've realized that a path forward lies in capturing and distilling the gesture within a landscape; by emphasizing this nuance, the context is no longer necessary. That's been my first challenge. The second came when I realized that gesture is something I've understand mostly in terms of human forms, which means I've had to work at adapting and improving my ability to capture gesture in non-anthropomorphic forms, and then use that to explore what's most essential in that form.
The sculpture above is my third in this series of landscape-inspired sculptures; images of the two earlier works are below:
"Four Pieces Out and Down," Wenge wood, 7 x 50 x 2 inches, 2010
